Keywords – Education for Citizenship Museology Sustainability

Overview of the Research Group

This RG brings together researchers who explore the intersection between education and the societal challenges of our times and the future from a humanistic perspective, strongly committed to decentring a Western perspective. Its main societal challenges are issues related to the climate crisis and an idea of community beyond humans, plural identities and memories, difficult heritage, citizenship, democracy, and social justice. Past and current approaches fall under 4 main thematic axes:

– Geographical education investigates issues related to pedagogical and geographical thinking from different spatial contexts, articulating their physical, socioeconomic, cultural, geopolitical, environmental, and technological aspects with various theories.

– Heritage and museum education, interpretation and mediation understands cultural heritage as an intrinsic part of the relationship between people, communities, and society. It investigates educational policies and practices in heritage and museum contexts, paying particular attention to issues related to difficult heritage, representation and voice, identity, social inclusion, sustainability, and the mobilising of communities within a participative/collaborative framework.

– History education focus on issues related to school culture, history teaching and curriculum studies from a cross- cutting perspective of education, the teaching-learning process and training for citizenship.

– History of education is understood as a specific scientific field of educational systems, namely by analysing the structures and processes through which formal and informal education is thought of as a historical and social phenomenon, integrating the study of citizenship, social inclusion, democracy, the construction of identities, and painful pasts.

The dialogic and interdisciplinary nature of these axis aims to foster research based on an open communicative relationship between the researchers and communities to broaden dialogues beyond the academy and have a real impact.

The work of this Research Group is necessarily interdisciplinary, inclusive and plural, and is based on leveraging synergies from different areas of knowledge, such as history, education, museology, geography, anthropology, sociology, information science, the performing arts and the audiovisual sector. We are driven by challenges and aim to develop research with a real impact. That is, research supported by a deep commitment to processes of involvement and co-production with the community.